Reuniting the Rubins

There was excited chatter in the papers last week about how we’re currently basking in the glory of a golden age of British cinema. Well, someone forgot to pass the message to the makers of this unfeasibly poor melodrama about a fractured, middle-class Jewish family in suburban London. The illness of a testy matriarch (Honor Blackman) puts on hold the plans of her widowed son Lenny (Timothy Spall – why?) to go on a retirement cruise of a lifetime. Instead, he promises his ailing mother he will negotiate to gather his four very different grown-up kids – a businessman, an activist, a monk and a rabbi – in the same room for the first time in years. The characterisation is brash, the gags are well-worn and Spall ends up essaying a vastly inferior version of his family peacemaker role in ‘Secrets and Lies’. From the incessant and cheap directional score to the endless awkward shifts between the falsely serious and the flatly comic, this is cynical and amateurish.